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For Educators

Here you will find CGD work of special interest to development studies educators and their students including syllabuses from courses taught by CGD-affiliated professors as well as slidedecks and multimedia presentations. We have selected from CGD’s hundreds of publications those that provide broad overviews or are otherwise more readily accessible than CGD’s more technical work. Search the materials by topic using the toolbar below and consult our list of development programs at different universities around the world.

Visit CGD! As the CGD event schedule permits we welcome faculty-led student groups to our offices in Washington for one-hour introductory briefings and Q&A. Faculty interested in arranging such of visit are invited to contact Jeremy Gaines.

Book Purchase and Review Copies: CGD books are available for purchase online through our website or, for bulk orders, through the Hopkins Fulfillment Service, P.O. Box 50370, Baltimore MD 21211-4370. Tel: 1-800-537-5487. For complimentary review or exam copies, please send a note to publications@cgdev.org with details about the potential review or the course you are teaching.

Founded in 2002, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (the Global Fund) is one of the world’s largest multilateral health funders, disbursing $3–$4 billion a year across 100-plus countries. Many of these countries rely on Global Fund monies to finance their respective disease responses—and for their citizens, the efficient and effective use of Global Fund monies can be the difference between life and death.

The Commitment to Development Index ranks 27 of the richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit poorer nations. Denmark takes first in 2015. The UK is tied for sixth while the United States is 21st. Japan takes last of 27.

Drawing from existing domestic experiences and the first results of the international debate, this paper tries to identify some high-level recommendations on how the payments system should be regulated to best achieve the particular goal of inclusion.

Using an experimental design, we assess the feasibility of interactive voice recognition (IVR) surveys for gauging citizens’ development priorities. Our project focuses on four low-income countries (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe). We find that mobile phone-based approaches may be an effective tool for gathering information about citizen priorities.

The paper discusses three problems in measuring global poverty: (i) how to allow for social effects on welfare, recognizing the identification issues involved; (ii) the need to monitor progress in raising the consumption floor above its biological level; and (iii) addressing the longstanding concerns about prevailing approaches to making inter-country comparisons of price levels facing poor people.

The Report of the High Level Panel on Humanitarian Cash Transfers shows why giving aid directly in the form of cash is often a highly effective way to reduce suffering and to make limited humanitarian aid budgets go further. We urge the humanitarian community to give more aid as cash, and to make cash central to future emergency response planning.

This paper considers the effectiveness and efficiency of global growth, as a route to poverty reduction, since 1990 and then demonstrates the redistributive challenges implicit in various poverty lines and scenarios.

There are two dominant narratives about taxation. In one, taxes are the “price we pay for a civilized society” (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). In this view taxes are not a necessary evil (as in the pairing of “death and taxes” as inevitable) but a positive good: more taxes buy more “civilization.” The other view is that taxes are “tribute to Leviathan”—a pure involuntary extraction from those engaged in economic production to those who control coercive power producing no reciprocal benefit. In this view taxes are a bane of the civilized. We consider the question of taxes as price versus tribute for contemporary India.

An area of tropical forest the size of India will be deforested in the next 35 years, burning through more than one-sixth of the remaining carbon that can be emitted if global warming is to be kept below 2 degrees Celsius (the “planetary carbon budget”), but many of these emissions could be cheap